


Zero Day

by Windian



Category: Horizon: Zero Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-18
Updated: 2017-04-18
Packaged: 2018-10-20 15:24:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10665456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Windian/pseuds/Windian
Summary: Planet Earth is dead, and Elisabet and the Alphas hold a wake for the end of the world. She's never been able to hold her drink. GAIA fusses.Out of the dozen human beings at this facility,  isn't it funny that the only one Elizabet feels completely comfortable talking to is an artificial intelligence?





	Zero Day

The project makes it by the skin of its teeth. GAIA is installed in her new home— in _your_ new home, you and the rest of the Alphas. The bunker is sealed and sealed again. You’re safely squirrelled away inside the heart of the mountain, ready to hibernate away global extinction. Or, entombed– as Travis Tate cheerily put it– as you close the final bulkhead.

Still, you can’t deny there’s a truth to his words. None of you will see the new world you’ve spent the last two years painstakingly designing.

There’s no windows in the bunker– nothing to see anyway but barren ground and burnt sky, burnished an unsettling red by the collapse of the biosphere a fortnight past. The Hartz-Timor swarm has crawled across the face of the globe, devouring everything in its wake. And it feels like some sort of bizzare wake. Zero Day– and you’re drawn by some grim compulsion, yourself and all the Alphas, gathering in the community room. You balance a cup of hot blandless coffee between your thighs as the final blips on the radar vanish. Life on Earth erased, as neatly and tidily as sand swept from a mezzanine. Show’s over. That’s all folks. The Earth is dead, and the coffee in your hands feels stone cold; a chill has crept into your body you can’t shudder away.

Still so many calculations to do. Final tweaks, code adjustments. Easier to do as you’ve always done and submerge yourself in your work. But nobody in the community room moves. Samina looks as though she’s frozen solid. You can’t stand the silence– the absolute stillness of a dead world. You’re almost grateful, then, when Travis reveals the bottle of 2019 brandy he smuggled from who-knows-where.

“A toast,” he says. For a man who always speaks carelessly, there’s a grandiose thrum to the words.

“To _what_?” Ron says, scoffs at him.

“Planet Earth.”

Ron looks to you. Expects you to shoot him down, probably.

Instead, you hold out your glass.

“To planet Earth.”

The send off ends when Travis passes out. Samina is singing some 20th century song about country roads and as you stumble back to your cabin, rum bottle in hand, you join your voice to hers.

-take me home – to the land– where I belong –

A hiccup on indignation interrupts you. Home. Isn’t that hilarious?

What a fucking funeral. A dozen nerds who can’t hold their liquor poisoning their livers for planet Earth.

Well, there’s nothing else left to ruin.

You remember, now, that there was a reason you stopped drinking after college.

A voice emanates from the speaker by the bed. GAIA.

“Elisabet, you appear to be intoxicated.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“Very well. The smallest breed of penguin is the Adélie penguin, which reside solely along the Antarctic coast–”

A snort of laughter. GAIA is still learning. She’s mostly got down the paradox of human language but once in a while rhetoric trips her up.

“You ought to drink some water before you go to bed, Elisabet,” GAIA says.

“Sure, Mom.”

She’s a dab hand at detecting sarcasm, however. Probably has spent too much time with Travis.

“If I was your mother, you might listen to me more and start getting the required number of hours of rest.”

Well.

You do as you’re bid, however. You drink a pint of water. You’re almost about to crawl into bed in your clothes before GAIA reminds you to at least take of your shoes.

You wrap yourself in your duvet, but sleep doesn’t come. Something had been bothering you, watching the blips disappear from the screen– other than the global extinction.

“GAIA, are you still there?”

“Yes, Elisabet?”

She responds immediately. The past few months, your talks before bed with the AI have become routine. Sometimes, it’s just about the project. More often, lately: about art, history, music, family. Your family. There are a dozen human beings at this facility, but isn’t it funny that the only one you feel comfortable talking to is an artificial intelligence?

Sometimes you wonder what that says about you.

“Do you think… human beings really deserve a second chance?” you ask.

GAIA’s processors can answer two thousand queries simultaneously. And yet, here, she pauses.

She poses her own question back: “Do you not think your race worthy of one?”

“I did,” you say. You speak a little breathlessly. The words tumbling out. “I mean, why else would we have worked so hard these past eighteen months on Eluthia? But watching those lights flicker out… I couldn’t help but think, we did this. The entire cradle of existence, millions of years of evolution, wiped out by the foolishness of one man. Just one man. And what if… what if…”

Your tongue is thick from drink– you’re still slightly tipsy. It’s probably why you’ve decided it’s a good idea to voice your concerns about humanity’s continued existence to an omnipotent AI in the first place.

GAIA tries to reassure you.

“There are a dozen failsafes in place, Elisabet.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Frustration, thick in your throat.

GAIA waits, patiently. She’s always patient. In her you’ve programmed all the qualities you feel yourself to lack.

The fact that the AI has become a dear friend to you, however, was not something you’d programmed, nor could have anticipated.

“What I mean is, maybe the new world we’re creating would be better without us in. Without men like Ted Faro.”

There is silence for a long time.

For a moment, you fear you could be right.

But when GAIA responds, it’s with your own voice. An audio clip. A speech you’d given. It doesn’t take you long to recognise it– you’d rehearsed it long enough, pacing the length of your dorm room, shedding sticky notes in a trail. Back during the start of the claw-back, back when you were an impassioned college student furious at the corporates who had traded the Earth’s jungles away for cold impartial dollars. Later, one of your professors had caught you by the elbow. “Determination as sharp as the point of a spear,” she’d said.

“This world belongs to all of us,” GAIA repeats.

“That’s… kind of embarrassing to listen to. I mean, I didn’t even know anyone kept those old recordings…”

GAIA ignores you. Rightfully so.

“I want to do this, Elisabet. Not for the Ted Faros of the world. For the Elizabet Sobecks.”

You mumble a reply. Now you’re really embarrassed.

“Besides, Elisabet. You don’t really mean this; you’re just drunk.”

And damn it, she’s right.

“I guess I’m really just mad I won’t be able to see this brave new world of yours.”

If only humanity had a few more years. Could have perfected cryogenics. What you wouldn’t give to walk among GAIA’s new Earth.

“Jealous?” GAIA teases you.

“As hell.”

You twitch the duvet up around you. “I suppose it’s not too late to switch to Hinduism. I’m starting to see the appeal of reincarnation. To be reborn… a clean slate. To start again. You could catch me up on what I’d missed over the next few centuries.”

Sleep tugs at you. A latent effect of the brandy. You know you’re rambling.

“I would like that, Elisabet,” GAIA says.

The alcohol feels like a warm cocoon. The Earth is dead; this mountain is your tomb. But cradled by GAIA’s warm, comforting voice, you feel a safety you haven’t felt in years, before the plague, before the madness. Almost like being home.


End file.
